Navratil: Be faster with your ears than with your mouth

As the last few days have passed, the conversation surrounding former football head coach… As the last few days have passed, the conversation surrounding former football head coach Michael Haywood has changed.

No longer is he referred to as “the man accused of domestic battery.” Instead, I’ve overheard people around campus consistently refer to Haywood, who pleaded not guilty earlier this week, as “the man who beat his baby’s mama,” “another kind of disciplinarian,” or some variation on those phrases.

It seems that people have forgotten that Haywood has not been convicted — he’s only been charged, or accused.

In this there is a lesson. We pride ourselves on living in a country where the press enjoys relative freedom and ideally exposes us to the great evils of society — everyone’s heard of Watergate or the Pentagon Papers.

But in our idealism, we have abandoned skepticism. This is a particularly dangerous idea, because the American press is not as free as it seems. Journalists, like other citizens, are bound by the law.

When it comes to reporting on crime, journalists are generally protected from costly libel lawsuits only when they report from a specific handful of sources: police reports and court documents or testimony.

The fair report privilege guarantees that journalists can write about anything in a police report if they do so accurately and in a fair and balanced manner.

But a police report — often the first document journalists use to break news — only contains an account as reported by the responding officers. These documents are not conclusions in a legal sense.

To offer a differing account of events, journalists must have a handful of sources confirming the other sides of the story. This, however, becomes virtually impossible when lawyers tell their clients to shut their mouths or risk jail.

“Any statement that you make can be used against you,” said Whitney Hughes, director of Lawyer Referral Services at the Allegheny County Bar Association. “Those statements are going to come back to haunt you. It’s something that’s ingrained in you from the day you start.”

And even if journalists can speak to the person accused of a crime or to their lawyer, there’s no guarantee they will be able to print the material. Just because a reporter “gets the quote right,” doesn’t mean they will be protected if they print libelous material.

Thus, it becomes virtually impossible to obtain the defendant’s side of a story, beyond what is mentioned in the police report.

Haywood could not be reached for comment and his attorney, Andre Gammage, understandably declined to comment.

It’s important, however, to hold off on judgment until the entire legal process unfolds.

Cynics might easily ask why they should reserve judgment when the police report said officers noted that the mother of Haywood’s 21-month-old son had “dark red marks on her neck and lower face/jaw area, a small raised mark on her back and redness on her lower right arm” and that the marks the officer found on her were “consistent” with the woman’s story that Haywood had placed her in a chokehold.

For those cynics, I offer a few anecdotes.

I spent this past summer interning for The Plain Dealer, the daily newspaper in Cleveland.

While there, I covered a story about a man named Christopher Lathan.

Lathan’s brother, postal worker Robert Lathan Jr., went missing in January 2010 and was found dead several days later by a volunteer search and rescue crew hired by the Lathan family.

Seven months later, police arrested Christopher Lathan for involuntary manslaughter and obstructing justice.

Christopher was involved in a car accident the day his brother went missing. The police report said that officers did not see Robert at the time of the crash, and Christopher made no mention of him. That was easy to report immediately as the police report was a protected document.

What took far longer — several hours (and I was lucky it didn’t take days) — was tracking down Christopher’s relatives, who, aside from a lawyer, were the only ones we could seek for comment when Lathan was in jail.

His relatives were infuriated. Christopher’s wife, Tonya Swift, spoke to other news outlets. I spoke to his brother-in-law, who said that Lathan told police Robert had been in the car with him. It was only because both of these sources spoke to the media that I was able to tell that side of the story at all.

The media spent the next week asking local law enforcement officials for more details about the case. One week later, a city judge dismissed the charges against Lathan. A man who could have easily been viewed as a liar and an accidental murderer was instantly seen as innocent by most people.

Need another example of someone treated as if they were guilty and then found not guilty?

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that a Texas man who spent 30 years in prison for rape and robbery was declared innocent after DNA evidence exonerated him.

I’m not saying Haywood’s innocent. I’m not saying he’s guilty. The point is that we don’t know.

So to Haywood and his attorney Gammage, I say, when you’re ready to talk and it’s convenient to talk, we’ll be ready to listen. I hope the rest of our readers will be too.